130 not hoarding, but...

July 25, 2020

At Safeway. They have TP, wipes, bleach. I am buying. Not hoarding. Checking with Deb to see if we ordered toilet paper online. But buying.

Do we need a whole gallon of bleach? Not yet. But we may if we need to start disinfecting our bathroom regularly.

Why would we need to do that? Well, we were talking last night about what we'd do if one of us gets sick.

Fuck. My cashier coughed. Like five times. Into his mask. And wiped his forehead, like he was hot. At 8am. In Diamond Heights.

(For those unfamiliar with SF microclimates, Diamond Heights is about as cold as they come.)

We're having a pandemic. Why aren't we having our temperatures taken before entering stores? Including employees? That's what they're doing in China, at least where there are outbreaks. And with an Rt over 1, SF currently qualifies as an outbreak.

If we don't take this seriously, we're headed toward another lockdown. Maybe a more heavy-handed one.

Speaking of heavy handed.

Not a great headline during a self-declared, self-mismanaged national emergency in an election year in which we've already seen primaries postponed, polling places closed, debates foregone, and conventions cancelled.

But here we go. What if I try this one?

Obviously very little could go wrong, right?

Obviously, it's just a ruse aimed at Antifa anarchist agitators. Nobody respectable could get dragged in.

Like the mayor of Portland.

But it's not the first time he's used it.

And now a break from following the goonsquads, for a little following the money.

We start here, with my former neighbor. (It's true, when married to our at-the-time mayor Gavin Newsroom, she lived a few blocks away...up hill.)

It turns out she's in charge of fundraising, or is now. So how is dear leader doing?

Uh oh. But but there must be hope, right? (FYI, this is how you talk when you want your readers to have hope. I just want us to have a clue.)

So how do these dollar amounts stack up against some previous candidates?

Hillary churned through a half a billion smearing dear leader as hard as she could.

Bernie spent a hundred or two hundred million letting us know we can have Medicare for all and a political revolution.

Ok, maybe 300 million.

44 was the previous record holder, in 2008.

But he was no slouch in 2012, either.

Meanwhile, this headline came out the day after my big Amazon order.

Whoops.

So after all of that, how about a little good news?

If it's not one thing, it's another.

But we can do this. Ready?

Set.

Go!

Learning to sail, I was first attracted to heavy, seakindly boats that could get you there safely. The Bristol 24, above, is an example. Heavy full keel, six feet of standing room below.

Then I got into dinghy sailing. And I realized, light weight, responsive and fast were also kinda nice things in a sailboat.

Old boats that I'd previously thought were kinda ugly started to look good.

Especially under sail.

And I started to see the holy grail of small, ocean capable boats as something like these mini-transat racers.

Come on!

So yesterday, I fell in love with a new boat. (Well, new to me, they've been around since 2008.)

It's like a pared-down, shorter version of a mini-transat.

There's a one design racing scene. (In Europe. There may still be a few advantages to a Cal20 in SF.)

There's even a little bit of a cruising scene.

It's sort of beachable.

And it's totally ready for a race like R2AK. (Google it.)

Yeah, I've got a new crush. And dream vacation.

I said "dream."

And now, the lighter side of the darkness.

How to avoid getting sick... Start a band! Here's an idea for our first album.

Get the joke?

Somebody needs to.

And now back to the pandemic.

This map is getting darker.

SF, at one tenth the size of LA or NYC, is punching above our weight, at least in terms of how many of us are going out of business from sheltering-in-place. (Our lower numbers of sick people fortunately do reflect this.)